How we ended up at Frasers
On 1 December 1973 I married the love of my life, Maggie. We decided to go away for the weekend and came home afterwards to discover that my mother had suffered a stroke. My first son made his appearance the following year – we called him Mark. After that we moved to Cape Town where my second son, Michael was born. I thought Cape Town was going to be a fantastic place to live and work in but after two years we moved back to Johannesburg. Fortunately, a company that supplied coal crushing machines and conveyor belts to the mines employed me and I was rewarded with a salary increase, back pay and a December bonus that year. I bought a white Ford Cortina because we needed a car. Life seemed very good but in January the following year my supervisor walked into my office and casually told me that I was being retrenched. I had two months to find another job and leave. I recently Googled my old company and discovered that they had been taken over by a bigger UK-based company. I was just consi...